Good Fridays w/Padre: Loose Change

This weekend, Notre Dame Seniors will enter the Stadium where they never saw their team lose this season.  But they won’t be cheering for just another football victory.  They’ll be cheering for a far more important victory – their own graduation.  Keep in mind: football is a nice touch, but our whole purpose here is the education that culminates in graduation.  And that’s why more of our football players graduate here than anywhere else (and by “more” I mean very nearly every single one of them).  So it is fitting that victory be laid on top of victory by conferring degrees in the 360 degree arena of triumph known as Notre Dame Stadium…until they change it…again.

I know change doesn’t go down well here.  It never has.  But somewhere there seems to be written a list of things that can never change because of that equally elusive value called tradition.  I will now shatter a few ill-conceived, though perhaps cherished, notions about change and tradition with respect to things on this campus.  Shall we start at the beginning – yes, we shall.

My Log Cabin.  These days, that ramshackle old hovel where I sheltered from the blinding (literally) winter of 1842, is reverently called the Log Chapel.  Sure, we made it a chapel, after we built a suitable, modern building.  Believe me, there’s nothing that can’t be turned into a chapel, and no building is complete without one.  But the cabin was not my creation; it came with the property…and there was a reason Steve Badin was only too happy to be rid of all of it.  So every time you genuflect going by the cabin-chapel, remember that it’s an outbuilding I moved out of as soon as I could.  Oh, and it’s not real.  The original Log Cabin burned down, just like so many things here.  What you’re looking at is a replica.

My Old College.  That’s what it’s called now.  When I built it is was just The College, whole, entire, and complete.  It was basic, utilitarian, and constructed with absolutely no eye toward architectural beauty.  And it shows.  It probably should have been torn down at some point for the sake of reusing the bricks in something better.  But it’s built like a brick sh outhouse, so there was no sense in getting rid of a perfectly serviceable building.  Still, I’m sure the lads who live in it now would agree with the outhouse analogy on more levels than one.  Its floors slope at various angles in every direction; the doorways are low and trapezoidal; and it creaks and groans like a tramp steamer hung up on a rocky shoal.  Yes, our little carbuncle called Old College is what Notre Dame originally looked like.  How do you feel about change now?

My Sacred Heart.  Well, it’s Jesus’ Sacred Heart, but my church.  Again, not the original.  Check the cornerstone – it says 1871.  Did you think I had no church between 1842 and 1871?  And the Lady Chapel is an addition.  When The BVM says She wants a place of Her own, you build it, even if you have to add it onto the back.

My Main Building.  Everyone knows it’s not the original.  It’s actually the third.  Like it?  Most people do.  But it didn’t come with a Dome.  That wasn’t added until three years later.  And it wasn’t Golden until three years after that.  Again, when The BVM says She wants a giant gold footstool, you do it.  Remember, too, that the Main Building was offices, classrooms, dining hall, and dormitories all in one.  Change is a blessed thing when you can move a horde of raucous and pungent college lads out of your office.  Which brings me to…

My Hall.  The luxuries I gave my lads!  A standalone dormitory with private rooms!  I had already given them electric lights – first college in the country using that exciting modern science (really, I’d do anything to get away from open flames).  But My Hall, which now thinks it’s a college…fine…does not appear in its original form.  The wings are later additions so we could pack more bodies in there.  And the porch came even later than that.  The porch was built onto the front to prevent the lads from dumping buckets of water out the upper windows and onto unsuspecting victims entering through the main doors.  No joke.

The list could go on; but let’s focus on the thing at hand – the Stadium.  Built in a rush (as so many of our building have been) it was elegant in its own way.  But just ask my esteemed successor Ted Hesburgh and he’ll tell you the Stadium was unpopular just 30 years after its opening, by which time it was considered antiquated, undersized, and crude.  Ted considered demolition and reconstruction (a fire is much cheaper), but he had priorities: First a Library, and then Ned Joyce’s sports big-top.  So the Stadium survived until it was encased in a concrete shell that can never be called elegant in any way.

Onto the Stadium we now want to add offices, classrooms, dining facilities, and something called “luxury boxes” which is precisely what I called the private sleeping rooms in Sorin Hall when we built that.  So it will be just like the Main Building was originally.  We are returning to tradition!  But traditionalists aren’t happy because at Notre Dame there is a pervasive confusion between “custom” and “tradition.”

Custom is the way things are generally done, and have been done for a while.  Tradition is a collection of customs that have been handed on from generation to generation and age to age, so that they have become freighted with deep, symbolic meaning.  Customs change; traditions endure.  Anything that changes over time is, therefore, a custom.  Something that has never changed is a tradition.  And there are no such things as new or recent traditions – unless you’re talking about oxymorons.

Furthermore, we’re talking about THINGS here.  Buildings are things, and things cannot be traditions.  They can be old or beautiful or relatively unchanged for many years.  But they’re still just things, and we do not place inordinate value in things.  I was upset when my second Main Building burned – but I built a better one.  And then I installed electricity.  And recently, they entirely rebuilt the interior.  That sort of change is called progress.  This place started with someone else’s log cabin – but look at it now!  Since it’s summer, we’re going to build even more buildings that I never thought of.  So I suppose you could say it’s a custom at Notre Dame to preserve its older buildings; but one of our most cherished traditions is progress.

Do what you want to the Stadium.  It was already changed once.  And it’s just a thing.  Victory is a tradition.  We have preserved that tradition on Cartier Field and in Rockne’s original and into the current Stadium-within-a-stadium.  But the greater victory, the tradition of graduation, we have preserved even longer…on the Main Quadrangle, in Washington Hall, in the Fieldhouse now gone, in the Stadium, on the South Quadrangle, in the Joyce Center, and back in the Stadium again.  The location is just a custom; the graduation is a tradition – and a glorious achievement.  Congratulations, Seniors!  And be prepared: Notre Dame will have changed by the time you come back.  It always does.

EFS CSC

Lunch with Brady Hoke: Tastes Like Chicken

So Brady Hoke had a luncheon in Grand Rapids and decided to voice his displeasure over Notre Dame cancelling the Michigan series. More precisely, he claimed the Irish were “chickening out” of the series, much to the delight of the audience.

Hoke’s insertion of his foot into his mouth is simply begging for analysis ridicule as is this entire article, so let’s just get to it.

Brady Hoke has long trumpeted Michigan’s three primary rivalries against Notre Dame, Michigan State and Ohio State.

Hoke is now entering his third season as the Skunkbears’ head coach. How does one “long trumpet” anything when they haven’t even eclipsed Ty Willingham’s tenure at ND?

If two years is a long period of time for Michigan, I think I understand why some rather obvious history is soon to be forgotten.

But now he’s losing one of them, at least for a time. And he’s clearly not happy about it.

“The Notre Dame game, that rivalry, which they’re chickening out of,” Hoke said Monday during the West Michigan Sports Commission Annual Luncheon at the J.W. Marriott in Grand Rapids.

The remark drew thunderous applause from the crowd.

Ok, fair enough, he’s angry, playing to a home crowd. Let’s see how he justifies this…

“They’re still gonna play Michigan State, they’re gonna play Purdue, but they don’t want to play Michigan”

Well, yeah, we are trying to, but that isn’t exactly certain right now.

You see, Hoke, your B1G commissioner decided to do this whole nine conference game thing that is kinda screwing up everyone’s schedule. Combine that with ND’s new ACC scheduling agreement and, surprise, there are some issues.

Want to know why we are trying to work around that with Sparty and Purdue? Some history for you, long trumpeter: Notre Dame and Michigan State have played 75 times, and only took 1995 and 1996 off since 1948. Notre Dame and Purdue have played 84 times, uninterrupted since 1946.

But Michigan? Oh, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Spoiler alert: Michigan has been a pain in the ass.

“I don’t know how they made that decision…

I don’t either, there is totally no history behind why we might decide to give Michigan the finger. NOPE, NONE AT ALL.

… I really do …

Wait, what?!

Hoke had to have done a shot mid-sentence or something. Or no one has the complete quote…you know what, I like my first idea better. Go home, Hoke, you’re drunk.

But anyway, that’s a great national rivalry game. It’s a great game.”

I’d argue it’s a regional rivalry, and really, I have a hard time saying it’s a rivalry because, let’s be honest, we both hate each other and each consider another school a bigger rival.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of just what this series means to you and why all of us under the Dome are running away scared. I’m sure your beat writer will help you out…

Michigan has played Notre Dame 40 times, including every season since 2002.

..or maybe he’ll prove my point for me.

Michigan has treated us to three separate gaps in the past. After the 1909 game, we didn’t play Michigan again until 1942. After 1943, we didn’t face off again until 1978. Finally, we had a smaller two year gap between the 1999 and 2002 contests.

That’s 70 years total of scheduling gaps if you are keeping score at home. Or, to put it another way, Michigan has avoided playing Notre Dame for 56% of our 125 year football existence.

But man, uninterrupted since 2002 after these Michigan scheduling disruptions. How dare we.

But the Irish last year cancelled their games against Michigan from 2015-17, as they make the move to a scheduling alliance with the ACC.

ND, the dastardly villain, ditching the history of the Michigan series, chickening out for their new ACC friends.

The rivalry already was scheduled to take a two-year hiatus in 2018-19.

Small addendum: Michigan did that. That brings to the total to four different occasions in which Michigan, not Notre Dame, messed with the scheduling of the series.

Here’s the kicker: all Notre Dame has done so far is cancel two games — the exact same amount that Michigan already canned. But yeah, go ahead and blame us for chickening out on the whole thing. Solid logic there.

So, Michigan will host Notre Dame for the final time — at least, for the foreseeable future…

Now we’ve entered WWE-style promotion/hyberbole: “THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN…”

“…UNTIL IT HAPPENS AGAIN!”

– in prime time this year, then conclude the series next year in South Bend.

Notre Dame: chickening out…three years in the future.

The teams had been operating under a three-year rolling contract — meaning, either program could cancel the series with three games’ notice. Notre Dame served Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon with that notice in the moments leading up to kickoff of last year’s game at Notre Dame Stadium.

You mean to tell me Swarbrick did something within the terms of the contract? Man, we are truly awful.

Michigan State and Purdue are scheduled to continue their rivalries with Notre Dame, at least for now. Although, the Big Ten’s new nine-game schedule, and Notre Dame’s ties to the ACC, could also make those games more difficult to play.

And we’ve now come full circle. The B1G and ACC scheduling restrictions could make the MSU and Purdue series difficult to continue.

But the Michigan series? NOPE NO POSSIBLE ISSUES, CHICKENING OUT.

In conclusion, to Hoke and any other Michigan fan pissed off about this:

Good Fridays w/Padre: Last Hurrah

Send three volleys of cheers on high for our Seniors! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hooray! As final exams end today, so begins your last week at Notre Dame. Be proud. Be gracious. Be generous. Be humble. But above all, be happy! For you have achieved something great. And you have achieved it together. When you arrived here as a herd of freshmen in 2009, did you think that in your Senior year you would see your classmates lead your football team to an undefeated season and a #1 ranking? Probably not. And so you have learned something – you have learned to believe. You see, we use football not just as a diversion, we use it as a teaching device. That’s the only way to be #1 on the field and #1 where we are now…graduation.

What, then, did you learn on the field and in the stands over the past four years? You learned that the only way to achieve victory is through very hard work, every single time. You learned that success is not instant – it is gradual and it requires both dedication and change. And you learned that to any goal which you ardently desire, you must devote your intelligence, your courage, and your strength.

In the classroom, which you have occupied far longer than the Stadium, and which you have shared not just with your classmates from the football team, but from every one of our tremendously successful teams, you have learned to think and to reason, to calculate and to deduce. In the classroom you learned to use your mind; in the stadiums and arenas, you learned to use your heart. And that is why, when you graduate, you wear a mortarboard on your head and a black robe across your chest. You are clothed in the uniform of achievement and victory.

But this cap-and-gown is really the Shamrock Series uniform of your life – it’s pretty funny looking, it’s comprised of a combination of odd colors, and you only wear it once. It also leaves out something essential…it leaves out your hands. You’ve learned to use your intelligence and your courage, your mind and your heart. But what about your strength? That’s in your hands. Hands that will write, compose, and design; hands that will care, heal, and cure; hands that will instruct, admonish, and encourage; hands that will pile up treasures and give away gifts; hands that will hold your children or be anointed with the oils of holy orders.

And it is onto your hand that is placed the most important symbol of Notre Dame graduation: The Ring. A beautiful ring that at graduation is taken off, flipped around, and put back on for the rest of your life. Our Lady’s Golden Dome on one side; Our Life, Our Sweetness, and Our Hope on the other; sprinkled throughout with the Irish symbol of blessing, the shamrock. It is not a symbol of graduation – it is a symbol of life.

Whenever you have the chance, look at the ring of an older alumnus. It is nicked and dinged, and there are chips missing here and there. So, too, will your life be marked by tests and trials, failures and losses. But these blemishes do not diminish the overall beauty of the ring; they make the ring unique to the wearer. And neither will these travails diminish the overwhelming beauty of your life; they will make it your life.

Whenever you have the chance, look at the ring of an ancient alumnus. It has been made smooth by age and years of hard wearing. All the sharp features are gone, along with all the scratches and scars, and it shines brightly all over. Let that happen to your life, too.

Make no mistake, your hands haven’t spent all of the last four years bent to work or folded in prayer. Your hands have caught footballs on the quad and held beer cans at parties. Your hands have clapped when your teams have won and when your friends have made fools of themselves in ridiculous situations. Your hands have stashed things in pockets, and executed pranks and dirty tricks. Your ring doesn’t somehow consecrate all these exploits, but it reminds you of all these good times that you’ve enjoyed under the Dome etched in its side – and in your hearts forever.

When you arrived here as a herd of freshmen in 2009, we said, “Welcome to Notre Dame!” As you graduate in 2013, we say, “Welcome to your lives!” No matter where you’re going, whether it’s across the country or around the world, you won’t be far. Because this place will always be here. And a good part of you will always be here…forever.

EFS CSC

Hint of Change Sparks Panic and a Rethinking of Architecture as We Know It

“Eventually, we want a big Jumbotron in there. We think that’s something that’s going to add to the atmosphere, too.” Those words, spoken two seasons ago by Notre Dame Head Football Coach Brian Kelly, sent a frisson of panic up the stenotic spine of a Notre Dame Nation already overwhelmed by Crazy Train and night games. A year and a half later, on the surfaces unseen in an architect’s rendering, revealed May 2, 2013, by Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick and Notre Dame Executive Vice-President John Affleck-Graves, perhaps hang the Jumbotrons of our future fan experiences.

The imagined tweaks to Notre Dame Stadium would literally and figuratively anchor it to the rest of campus. A new press box would connect to the Joyce Center to the east while a new student center would spring along the stadium’s west side. The idea, according to Vice President Affleck-Graves, is to augment the resources available to students, i.e. there is no thought of replacing LaFortune, while maintaining the campus’s “pedestrian” quality. With additional classrooms and event space part of the concept, classes of the future will spend a lot more than Saturdays in the Fall in and around the stadium.

First opened in 1930, “The House That Rockne Built” drew architectural inspiration from Michigan’s stadium and included a press box and “seats” for 59,075 fans. The same architects who designed Yankee Stadium, “old” Comiskey, and Fenway Park created a scaled-down Big House in which Coach Rockne roamed the sideline for but one season before his death in 1931. Renovations in 1997 gave the stadium its current look and added 21,000 seats by fitting a new exterior over the old, thereby preserving the old while decidedly dragging the place into the modern age of college stadiums. As we consider another change to Notre Dame stadium, consider what has been done to Michigan’s stadium.

In 2010, our neighbors to the north brought The Big House to its current gaudy capacity of 109,901 in a renovation that added, suites, seats and more suites. In 2011, Michigan added two video screens the size of which would likely cause a statistically significant percentage of NDNation to march on the Administration Building. Measuring forty-seven feet by eighty-five feet, each board has more than four thousand square feet of Light Emitting Diodes to tickle your rods and cones. Could that happen at Notre Dame Stadium?

There are clear and loud voices at Notre Dame who fall squarely in the “no” camp. A little less than one month ago, Professor Philip Bess, who is also the director of graduate studies at ND’s School of Architecture, penned Why a Jumbotron At Wrigley Field Is a Super-Sized Mistake on Chicagosidesport.com. Professor Bess writes ”[w]hen a stadium has a Jumbotron, the game becomes secondary and fans in the park start watching the screen rather than the game—which is why large video boards are a dependable source of advertising revenue.” An interesting question is how closely Professor Bess is to the ear of The University’s Architect , Doug Marsh, the man who will be a key figure in what ultimately transpires.

Notre Dame’s Campus Master Plan, released in 2002 and updated in 2008, set forth a number of tenets, the fourth of which calls upon planners to “steward” the camps’s “Notre Dame-ness” by choosing from “the pre-established palette of building materials, colors, and textures. Exterior materials will be chosen for their climactic endurance and for their consistency with representational and traditional architectural styles existing on the campus.” This stewardship of the essence of campus would seem to preclude the solution for Wrigley Field postulated by Professor Bess: video screens on the outside of the stadium.

While Notre Dame has a clear plan for the architectural development of campus, a plan that would clearly govern any changes to the non-football elements of the football stadium, whether Jumbotrons and Field Turf would be included or excluded by the Master Plan are unknown. Nothing in the document speaks to either, so it remains to be seen whether Professor Bess’s vision of a Jumbotron-free future will ultimately be undone by Coach Kelly’s desires.

Personally, I fail to see the harm in state-of-the art video screens that provide replay and public service announcements. Embracing the avant garde is decidedly in keeping with the spirit of Coach Rockne and the University Fathers who funded, in part, the construction of his vision through the then cutting-edge sale of personal seat licenses. What’s more, I believe that we must acknowledge an indulgence and allow the athlete’s places of performance to reflect their unique needs on match day. If it takes Crazy Train and Jumbotrons and Field Turf to fire up a five-star recruit, so be it. He should have his coliseum as he wants it, free for the moments of contest from what “we” think he should have, or what he should be happy with. If he who would see his future cut short or shattered by a broken bone or severed nerve want us on our feet and whipping towels over our heads, we owe that to him in the same way that he owes “us” excellence in the class room and residence halls. If Notre Dame can so integrate athletics and academics to make them the opposite sides of the same fabric, I fail to see how Jumbotrons cannot be incorporated into the literal brick and mortar of “our” Saturday seances.

Good Fridays w/Padre: Admit This

We have a controversy!  There is a tear in the seamless garment of our unity.  Ugly voices are raised in shouting and discord.  Someone has messed with the Stadium!  And this time it’s serious – someone has messed with the tickets.  Alumni and Subway Alums, put the lead pipes and letter openers down; this doesn’t call for violence on your part, because this has nothing to do with your tickets.  You will continue to be given one-sixth of the tickets you request at twice the price you expect.  This time the catastrophe has fallen on the students.  A brief summary of events in this vast injustice is in order first.

All students can buy season tickets at a “reduced” price.*  Each undergraduate class year occupies a quarter of the student section, stretching from the north end zone to midfield under the press box.**  Within a subsection, each student is assigned a row and seat number that corresponds to a faded glyph on a worn wooden board.  Students generally, but not always, try somewhat successfully to locate themselves around or near said faded glyph for portions, but not all, of the game.  In essence, the row and seat number is a vague suggestion that keeps a certain subtle order to the overarching chaos of the student section.  Yet, the seat number is not, in fact, a seat, since no one sits in the student section, except during halftime – if they’re not standing en masse to throw dessert items at each other.

 

In recent history,*** students quite literally camped out in an unruly and booze-fueled queue outside Ned Joyce’s sports big-top.  In this way, the first semi-comatose senior on the ground when the ticket office opened in the morning, received the best seat in the Stadium; and so on down the line until that last “football-is-vulgar” freshman deigned to pick up his tickets so the other kids in his section didn’t make fun of him.  Then that was forcibly organized into a controlled camping event, complete with chaperones and distracting non-alcoholic games.  Then this became an early evening picnic where students listened to live music (the only way to hypnotize them into obedience), and there were stickers and a lottery and a drawing – like a big parish bingo night, only for people a quarter of the usual age.  Finally technology advanced to the point that each student is given a number of the beast some sort of lottery number that allows them to apply, register, PAY IN FULL, and later pick up the appropriate tickets.  So as you can see, at an institution where tradition is prized above all else and preserved at all costs, there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the ever-evolving student ticket policy.  I call it the Heraclitus system, because all that is constant is change.

*Students currently pay the same amount for tickets that I used to charge for four years of a Notre Dame education.

**There’s some provision for graduate students, law students, and future masters of business administration.  It’s wedged between the upper and lower classes.  Like an ocean liner, state rooms above the grad students, steerage below.

***When the Stadium was built, we couldn’t even fill it.  Then the War put a dent in the number of students available to cheer during games.  After that, the ticket office, the Prefect of Discipline, and the rectors had a couple of systems.  And then we went coed.

That brings us up to date.  Now back to this week’s travesty.  It has been announced from on high that during this coming football season, within each class section, seating will be “general admission,” or what I like to call “free for all” or “every man for himself” or “last one in is a rotten egg” or “this is how people behave on a sinking ship.”  Have you ever seen the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain – it will look something like that, only with yellow-clad ushers replacing enraged bulls.  The impetus behind this most recent change is to allow the truly ardent fans direct access to the seats closest to the field.  In this way, the Stadium will be louder and the team will win more (more than 6-0 at home?).  And this is where the fur flies.

The great and powerful authority that orchestrated and announced this change is the Leprechaun Legion.  This is the student organization dedicated to increasing…for lack of a better term…school spirit at all sporting matches.  They publicize, advertize, excite, urge, cajole, give away free food and clothing, demand, guilt, and herd in order to increase student attendance at athletic events.  They also want to augment, raise, lift, amplify, and otherwise make bigger the intensity and volume at each of these events, all in the name of helping our Irish teams win.  This is all for the greater glory of Notre Dame, and the Legion deserves our unreserved thanks.  However, in this case, the Legion determined that there was a problem with the student section, investigated other student sections, devised a solution, sold it to the Athletic Department, and then dropped it on the students like an unwanted but permanent dorm room guest.

My first question is, when did Notre Dame students have a problem with unpopular decisions and rules being unexpectedly announced with no student consultation and enforced from above?  That’s how this place has always worked, people!  That’s how I set it up.  At least this time the decision was made by your fellow undergraduates, not some unnamed and inaccessible Administrator in the Office of Continual Improvement and Never-Ending Betterment.

My second question is, who on God’s green earth could attend a Notre Dame home football game and NOT realize that there are serious problems with the “level of excitement” in the Stadium?  In a monastery, Great Silence is the period of night after the last chanting of psalms and before sunrise.  In Notre Dame Stadium, Great Silence occurs shortly after kickoff, during every timeout, and frequently on third down.  If the Legion has a way to fix that, who could ever complain?

The issue is whether or not Great Silence emanates from the students, or is possibly caused by a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the students.  I would argue that the interminable timeouts, during which the winners of Mishawaka coloring contests  and employee non-used-sick-day awards are trotted into the north end zone, are a greater problem than the students.  It has rudely been put to me that Notre Dame’s “wine and cheese” alumni-and-friends base is the problem – I take that as an insult to my own and my University’s French heritage.  Will general admission in the student section get the cadavers in the gold thrones to cheer?  Is it a good idea to alter the one cheering corner of the Stadium in an effort to inspire the rest?

 

Yet, my third question is, who’s averse to trying to get the Stadium back on its collective feet?  A football game is like Mass – you’re supposed to be in the pew before the priest comes out of the sacristy, and you’re supposed to stay until he’s gone back.  When High Priest Kelly is leading his acolytes onto the field, many student-parishioners are still in the parking lot…literally.  And just like Mass, you’re there to sing and respond actively, and to pay attention to the sacred actions – not to chit-chat or visit with friends.  If that’s what you’re here to do, don’t bother the worshipers.  Stay in the vestibule of the upper seats and gossip away.  And so, is it terribly unjust to allow the true-believers to sit closest to the object of their devotion?

Sure, the power-lushes want to maximize happy hour and still be able to stagger to a seat where their double-vision won’t be too badly impaired by heads in front of them.  You’ll figure it out – you got into this University after all.  Sure, some students want football tickets more than they want a diploma; this is their season.  For those who don’t care so much, content yourselves with joining your closest friends for one of only 24 extraordinary, nationally televised spectacles of pageantry and drama that you will ever see – you’re only ten rows higher than you might have been had the lottery-gods favored you.  Sure, some students will cut their “total football weekend experience” short in order to stand in line for their ideal seats.  But how many true fanatics can there be out of a mere 8,000; how much space can they take up when we already pack you in hip-to-hip, knees-to-backs?  And don’t we want those carrying the most water for the team closest to the field?

My only complaint with the new student ticket policy is that it doesn’t apply to the rest of the Stadium.  Imagine how the House that Rockne Built would rock if the bitter and the mute were relegated to the upper deck where they could grouse about kids-these-days in hushed tones while their buttocks went numb from four hours of sitting.  This is a Stadium, not a museum.  At Notre Dame, traditions here are traceable back decades and even centuries, not to the last time someone tinkered with the system.  If students spend too much time complaining that every minor change and potential improvement constitutes a slap in the face to all that we have held sacred per omnia saecula saeculorum, they’ll start to sound like…GASP!…alumni.

Everyone who wants a ticket will have a ticket.  If we try really hard, the Stadium might become a place where our team loves to play and our opponents fear to tread.  If we do that right, we could very well have another undefeated home stand, and all will be right with the world.  Now go back to complaining about things that truly will never change – the weather, finals, and parietals.

EFS CSC